This disclosure relates generally to metrics for determining popularity, and more specifically to metrics for determining popularity based on user actions.
Social networking systems allow their users to easily interact and communicate with each other. A variety of different types of social networking systems exist that provide mechanisms allowing users to interact within their social networks. In this context, a user may be an individual or any other entity, such as a business or other non-person entity. Social networking systems also allow their users to interact with each other, or with other objects maintained in a social networking system, by performing various actions. For example, users may post comments to pages associated with other users, view images, view video, listen to audio data or perform other actions on various objects maintained by the social networking system.
Often, social networking users may desire to identify objects maintained by the social networking system in which multiple users are interested. For example, a user may seek to identify pages that a number of other users have interacted with over a day, a week or another recent time interval. This allows the user to identify and view content in which users have recently taken an interest.
While conventional social networking systems allow users to express preferences for objects, a user typically provides this information once per object, making it difficult to discern whether users are recently interested in an object or had previously been interested in an object. For example, if a song was popular years ago, many users may have previously expressed a preference for a page associated with the song, but the song and its associated page are not necessarily currently popular. Similarly, determining a number of actions performed on an object provides limited information about the popularity of the page, as a small number of users may be responsible for a large number of actions performed on an object. For example, a small number of users may perform a large number of actions on a page associated with an obscure hobby.